Funktastic Programming Adventures in Web Development

I am just getting slammed with things to do today here at work. I guess I am officially the bug fix boy around here. So not only do I have to do bug fixes for numerous clients, I have to handle mailing list campaigns for several other companies, and add new features to our applications with insanely short deadlines. You would think that I was working for a small company, but actually, I’m NOT!

Our company has about 200 different employees, but due to a recent exodus of our Information Technology people, there are not enough people here to help out with the programming / tech support issues. It’s bad enough when people start leaving one-after-another over the course of a year. It’s even worse when your company fails to hire good quality replacements.

Unless they hire some good programmers to help out, things are going to go from bad-to-worse around here. It’s funny how they stiffed us on our bonuses this year. It seems like they have no respect for us and don’t appreciate us at all. Sorry to bitch about stuff like this on my blog. I only hope my boss comes here to read this! Hahah - hope your job doesn’t suck as bad as mine does.

Today was a pretty uneventful day. Took a trip to a couple of stores around town to take care of some chores. Now I am feeling a lot better but my daughter is now sick with the same cold. I hate to see her suffer like that.

I finally made some headway on a project that has been dragging on for what seems like forever. It looks like we are just about to wrap up this project (I say with my fingers crossed.) It would nice if I could finally see some income on this project. This project has truly been the project from hell which is why I am not mentioning this project by name.

I knew this project wasn’t going to be easy from day one. I regret ever deciding to take on this project. It just goes to show how important it is to carefully evaluate a project before estimating its cost or accepting the project. It’s one of those lessons they don’t teach you in business school, but you can only learn from experience.

I’ve been feeling absolutely useless the past few days since I’ve been afflicted with this nasty cold. That is why I haven’t posted much here on my blog. I am going to get back into the swing of things starting today… honest!

I missed a couple of days at work so when I go into work tomorrow, I will have plenty of work on my plate. The good news is that I should be well rested! My boss is wondering if I plan on leaving. Recently, we have had a mass exodus of employees who sought work elsewhere because of the poor working environment.

My boss talked with me and asked me if I wasn’t happy working there and if I was looking for work elsewhere. Among all the employees where I work (at least among our IT staff,) I am probably the most content worker there. But then again, that really isn’t saying much.

Although, I’m still feeling the effects of a nasty stomach virus that I got this weekend, I went to work for the second day in a row. Today was a very busy day at work (well, compared to normal.) I spent some time getting back into the flow of things and fixing some bugs on our application. At the same time, I also put together an e-mail campaign for one of our clients.

Personally, I setup a new site to collect information about marketing a small business. My wife and I are going to be setting up an e-commerce site and selling products online. Hopefully, this should bring in a little more revenue this year. The new site is just a wiki site for collecting informational articles.

So far I’ve found some excellent articles on the net that have contributed to my knowledge. Well, I shouldn’t say contributed, because I am really starting at zero. I have no formal business training or education and I’m sure it shows. An excellent site for information is http://www.howstuffworks.com. I was going to buy a book on Marketing, but there is so much good information on the Internet, I can compile a book on my wiki by combining all of the best information I find.

I’ve been out of action for a couple of days because of a nasty stomach virus that has afflected me. I believe that I got it from my daughter just the other day. It has really made me feel week and my body has been aching bit.

Consequentially, I haven’t gotten any work done on my projects. I hope to be back in action first thing in the morning. There are a lot of projects on my plate right now and I need to start getting a lot of stuff done. Hopefully, this will be the last of the “cold season” for me.

As you all know, the Chargers lost the first playoff game the other night. It doesn’t really surprise me. They never fail to disappoint me each and every season. Now that’s consistancy that even George Bush would approve of!

Today is the first day of 4 straight rainy days in a row. This is highly unusual (captain) for weather like this in sunny San Diego. Although, on this first day, we really haven’t gotten that much rain. Today is a pretty boring and uninteresting day at work, just doing some routine maintenance on our web sites.

One of my cube-mates went out for a job interview today. About 2 minutes after he left, my boss walked in and asked, “where has he gone, did he go to lunch?” And of course, I said “yeah, I think so”. It looks like he has a pretty promising lead on a job really close to where he works now. If he leaves, he will be the second person to leave from our IT department this year alone.

This would really leave me in a pickle, because we will have lost two developers in the span of a week and I will be left to pick up the slack. So far the work load hasn’t been extraordinary, but it’s only a matter of time before disaster strikes and we will be feeling the crunch again. It might be time to start polishing off my resume … oh wait, I already did!

Today is the deadline for a major project I have here at work. I am hurriedly putting together all of the items necessary to launch. I just hope that there aren’t any major issues once this puppy is launched.

In order to make sure I meet this deadline, I have been working late the past few days. I don’t think it has really helped much because I didn’t seem to get anything done during the extra time. It would’ve helped me to get done sooner if I had a nicely defined specification of what needs to be done.

I just learned today that another one of my “co-irkers” is going to be leaving us at the end of this week. I wonder if my managers will bother to find a replacement for her. In the past, they have neglected to replace those IT employees who quit or were fired. More importantly, I wonder who is going to have to take over her responsibilities once she’s gone!

So I’m here at work trying to finish up a project that is due by Wednesday. I have been putting this project off as long as I can and now it is finally crunch time. I need to get this project done and working properly because my whole job could depend upon it.

So I am trying to work with code another person wrote, and I don’t really have a well-defined task description but I am managing to get everything up and running OK. It’s hard to work with someone else’s code when our company doesn’t have a policy of good coding practices, code review or unit testing.

I am having to re-organize and clean up code that someone else has written just so I can understand how the code works. There is little-to-no commenting in the scripts and it is very difficult to follow. Generally, we try to have the person who wrote the code maintain and update the code, but it’s not always possible. The reason why it’s not always possible is because my company has a high turnover rate and most of the people who wrote the original code have since quit.

This week looks to be another slow week at work. I haven’t seen my boss yet today but he should be slinking in anytime soon. Today is my first day back at work since the Christmas holiday.

Yesterday, I attempted to use up my last sick day by taking a day off of work. But apparently, there is some fine print in our employee manual that reads “You are not allowed to take a sick day adjacent to a paid holiday. Since we got Friday off for Christmas, you can just imagine what happened.

Our HR manager sent me a lovely note that reads: “If I mark you out as sick on this day, you will not be paid for the holiday of 12/24. You can take [the day] as a vacation day (you will need [your bosses] approval), then you will be paid the holiday. Please let me know what you want to do.”. It would have been nice if my boss or HR person would have called me because I didn’t get this e-mail until it was already too late.

The funny thing is that I’m paid a salary, so I get paid the same regardless. Maybe I’ll just take another sick day tomorrow. It will be my last chance before the year runs out and I lose my “earned” sick days anyways. If my boss hadn’t stiffed me so bad on my annual bonus, I would gladly give them my unused sick days. Oh well, such is life!

Today I had to launch some scripts on the production server just to test to fix the bugs in my code. You see, my boss here has had me cross over to work on another major section of the code that previously had been the responsibility of others. I don’t have the time to produce an adequate “test case” so I couldn’t test my code on our development server.

But I finally got the code done even though it involved considerable
fudging of the code and what I ended up with was quite a mess. Oh well, at least I got the job done and can relax a bit now.

The weather today is kind of cloudy. They said that it might drizzle this morning. But I didn’t notice anything like that when I woke up. It starts to get darker earlier and earlier out here. Summer is definitely making a hasty retreat. Next I have a wonderful e-mail blast to work on. At least that is more-or-less a mindless task.